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It's pretty difficult for providers to change if more than half the market sits out payment reform - While Medicare and Medicaid (in many states) are stepping up their payment reform implementations, private sector payers are still lagging behind, despite notable exceptions. In...

"The features of markets described in economic textbooks are not found in the healthcare industry and thus inhibit efficient operations of supply and demand" - This quote from our friend Rob Burns continues with: "These features include lack of price information and pricing transparency; lack of data on product quality; the resulting inability to assess the comparative...

If you spend any amount of time in your car, you either know of or use Waze - The concept of Waze is simple. It aggregates data from its users and feeds it back real time. The more people use it - and there are close to 100 million that do - the better the data. In places like...

What's worse, potentially avoidable complications or overused low-value services? Like for all things, it's all relative, and it depends largely on the condition, illness or injury. As many know, a few years ago the ABIM Foundation launched an ambitious program to engage medical specialty societies into identifying services that have very low value in treating a patient for a certain condition or illness. That...

350 million people, 350 million networks - On Wednesday September 30th, at a NEJM-sponsored event in Washington DC, Dr. Bas Bloem, a neurologist from the Netherlands, explained how he had launched an innovative solution for the care of patients with Parkinson's disease, ParkinsonNet. The...

Our Rogues Gallery has a new entrant, Martin Shkreli, and he's gone straight to the top - Mr. Shkreli, who has somewhat of a checkered past, is the CEO of a company that acquired the rights to manufacture a mostly generic...

The comments are in and they're not good for CMS but, by and large, they're fair and important. We hope CMS will finally pay attention - Of the 396 comment letters sent in on the recently announced Medicare Joint Replacement Bundled Payment program, the one from...

And, predictably, the apologists for the do-nothing crowd are raising their voices. They must be ignored - This week's NEJM includes a Perspective from Dr. Lisa Rosenbaum on the public reporting of quality measures, in particular ProPublica's recently released scorecard. As...

François de Brantes

François de Brantes is Vice President and Director, Center for Payment Innovation (CPI), which designs and implements innovative payment and benefit plan design programs to motivate physicians, hospitals, and consumer-patients to improve the quality and affordability of care. CPI works with states, employers, health plans, and provider organizations, as well as national consultancies such as McKinsey and KPMG, to advise them on payment and delivery system reform.

Mr. de Brantes has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and Health Affairs and is frequently quoted in national media, including The New York Times. He has also published two books, the latest being “The Incentive Cure: The Real Relief For Health Care.”